Including / Excluding files from build with VS2017 and .NET Core

I have a project where the wwwroot for an ASP.NET Core application is an SPA managed entirely by a node build chain. This means VS is completely hands-off with regards to the development of the UI, but it does have to somewhat be aware of it to debug and publish.

This would result in the wwwroot not getting compiled whatsoever, but the files within ‘dist’ would get published along with the .NET code. The node_modules folder was hidden within the VS Solution Explorer.

VS2017 / CSProj build

The auto-migration with VS2017 will attempt to follow the changes in the project.json, but the end result won’t work. VS will be super slow due to the node_modules folder, while also trying to compile the Typescript. You can wholesale block the compilation of Typescript, but I prefer to be a bit more explicit about what I want VS to do. Edit the .csproj for your project, and use the following ItemGroup to do ensure it does the same as the project.json from earlier:

2 comments

Thank you so much! Trying to find this everything… teach me to upgrade to VS2017 on day of release.

This configuration also copies the .json files from the route of the project. How can i exclude them from being copied
ie. package.json, tsconfig.json, tslint.json, typings.json, *.deps.json, *.user.json

All the above i would like to exclude from being copied when i publish